Go to > July 16,2012 | July 22, 2010 | Feb 12, 2010

Go to > July 16,2012 | July 22, 2010 | Feb 12, 2010

Go to > July 16,2012 | July 22, 2010 | Feb 12, 2010

The line came into existence a long time ago.  So long ago that we've lost memory of the line itself.  It's only when the mysterious anxiety comes that we think--maybe--we've crossed something.  So we draw lots of other lines in its place, hoping to spot the one that torments us.  There are all kinds of lines:  train lines, horizon lines, spring lines on ships, and liners themselves.  Those are travel lines.  Then there are the lines men tell you and the lines on your mother's brow.  Those lines have to do with sex.  Then there are the lines of discourse; lines of reasoning; and these lines I'm writing now.  We are born with lines engraved on our hands and then we set out to transcribe them on the earth's face.  So as we get old, the earth gets old.  And we think:  Monsters wait on the other side.

All lines, we already know, say no.  Travel lines tell you that you are here and not there.  That you may be going someplace else, but only at the loss of the place you are.  And who knows where the best place may be?  The sunniest day and the finest beach and the kindest man.  Sex lines tell you no.  You're supposed to be someone else:  someone for him; someone for mother.  Language lines are the most severe.  Things appear and disappear on either side.  I type.  The letters appear and everything else disappears, except the me who types and she types away the world.  While the monsters, I think, are laughing.  They know.  Sooner or later, she'll type across the line. Snow flurries and travelers' advisories in April.  I'm glad the weather is resisting Spring.  So am I.  The heat is coming up in the radiators, and I don't have to go out today . . . except maybe to the corner store for typing paper.  Yes, I like anomalous weather.  Eliot wrote:  "Mid-winter spring is its own season."  But now that's not anomalous anymore.  He wrote it; now I expect it.  Every mid-winter spring, I recite his line.

But snow in April.  That's anomalous.  I can settle into that--pull an easy chair right up to the radiator and get cozy.  Roland Barthes writes that we speak of the weather in order to say nothing, only that we speak.  And so confirm we exist--the intact subject "I."  I'm not so sure.  I never thought of the weather as confirming existence, only obliterating it.  Don't people generally get lost in storms?  

Anyway, I rarely know what it's like outside.  I've worked underground now for five years, mining the drudgery of New York restaurants.  And I've gone even further into the earth.  Last year, on my way to the time clock, I fell through the floor into an eight-foot-deep sump hole.  I grabbed onto the sides as I fell and hung there . . . for moments(?).  As far as I knew, New York is raised over the abyss and this was death.  I thought:  Why aren't I Burt Lancaster?  He'd hoist himself right out of here.  I tried to summon Burt, but it didn't work.  I fell.  A friend tells me that Hades grabbed Persephone's ankles in just the same way and pulled her underground.  But then she re-emerged--a Queen--and once a year returned the Earth to its verdure.  But I'm not ready for Spring.

I'm more comfortable with Derrida when he talks about the essential drift of writing . . . orphaned and separated from birth from the support of the father.  This is weather I understand.  It reminds me of snowdrifts and snow fortresses and icebergs, the polar wastes into which Mary Shelley sent her Frankenstein.

After all, aren't the heroines (and writers) always running into the storm?  Jane Eyre crossed the moors in a storm.  Catherine was the storm.  We hurl ourselves from the house into weather as if into something that is our own.  Men issue advisories--as intact subjects.  But women are heedless.  We prefer the storm.  It is familiar to us.  We may die here, only because we had to walk.  The men kept the horses and carriages. The day I arrived, the doctor announced that our mother's cancer had reached her liver and this was an ominous sign.  It convinced me:  The circle is a modern invention, despite its antique reputation.  We invented the wheel, and before that the Great Mother gave us the mandala.  But in none of these did we discover the circle.  We continued on.  We huddled close to the bonfire and watched the edge of darkness lapping at the light.  We looked up at the moon and it was flat and cold like a glacial pond.  And we didn't see the circle. Columbus said the earth was round, but he thought about three thousand miles or more to the Indies and how to keep his crew from mutiny.  He proceeded each day to the next horizon; perhaps, in the end, with the hope of falling off.  Yet, he continued to reassure his men--there are no monsters in the deep.

Now, the globe has been wrapped many times round:  cable across the ocean floors; steel tracks across the deserts (even in Australia); and Lindbergh's flights and the Apollo orbits.  The globe has even been blown up like a balloon and tossed to Charlie Chaplin playing at tyranny.  Now we recognize the circle--more and less.  We walk down a road and are convinced that, even if we go to China, we'll come back to New Jersey.  

I find no special charm in circles.  They do not relieve me of the presence of the line.  The circle only confuses which side I'm on, like destiny, which they say it is.  And I wonder:  Do the monsters sit beside me, around the bonfire, tricking me with their resemblance to myself; or do they lurk in the darkness, where they might be expected, at the edge of the warmth and light?  Perhaps the circle itself is the monster, seducing us with notions of--safe beside the fire, or chastened, though still ravenous, on the outskirts--while all along, sharpening its own round of teeth?

I sit on the beach and watch my sister.  I say:  You wrinkle up your nose the way you did when you were little.  And I hear my mother's voice in my voice and feel it is she looking at Susan.  I turn to the horizon.

Near the end, our mother said:  "It's like a place; like an encampment."  We asked what.  She answered:  "This bed."  This round we travel, always, sort of, like a place. As the sun sets, it lights up the marsh, filled with the Pamet river at high tide.  Beyond the glen, beyond the wood, and below our kitchen window.  It is my habit--before writing--to sit down in a particular chair by the kitchen window and sip coffee.  Each time I do, a flock of white birds rises from the marsh.  I'm convinced that my sitting releases their flight.  I've tried testing the theory, but then the birds seem to know and resist.  But when I least suspect it, whenever I sit in that chair with coffee in hand, before writing and usually at sunset, that flock of white birds rises over that particular crescent of stream.  Once they resettle, I can no longer distinguish them from the marsh grasses.  Some of these are called "cat-tails."  While I type, a flock of birds settles among the cat-tails.

Barthes wrote that writers, particularly writers like Proust, believe in the natural relationship between names and essences.  I don't know.  I've never found any relationship natural--but then, neither did Proust, I imagine.  Unlike Proust, however, I have no knowledge of flowers.  "Essences" only remind me of the perfumes I can't justify in my budget.  I know this is no excuse, only deficit vision; I'm just jealous of Proust's names.  He had the "Guermantes Way."  I have "Lampman Street."  And worse yet, what I find there:  my mother rolling grapefruits down a culm dump.  She was six; the miners were on strike for months; the government had surplus citrus for the grade schools.  Only the children couldn't guess what they were, so they bowled them down the black hills of residue coal.  

It is cold and gray in Truro this afternoon when my sister's boyfriend arrives for the holiday weekend.  He brings the mail and some tapes for the stereo:  a rejection from the New Yorker and Mozart.  I assume I'm missing some vital connection, the natural relationship:  the point in the plot without which I have no plot at all.  I keep laboring with this fear that the story line is something other than I've written.  We put the Mozart tape on:  The Magic Flute.  And as the sun sets, the sky clears.  Light slants from the upper right-hand corner of the window, across the glass, across the wood and marsh, to the left, across the page in my typewriter, placed (naturally) below the window.  With the music, a long stream (many bars) of black birds waves across the scene, which includes the page.  Is it Mozart's script or mine?

Excerpt from Mysteries of Eleusis (the first five minutes)

---

Testaccio, Rome.  October 1987.  That particular night, I carried an old letter with me.  After my mother's death, one of her British cousins returned a packet of her correspondence, from 1945 to 1965, twenty of forty years; the letters of the last twenty years, the cousin said, were too sad to send.  I walked to my usual bar for coffee and to buy a carton of milk.  Impossible to tell what distinguishes one bar from another in Rome.  The aroma of coffee is everywhere and everywhere the same.  You must choose a favorite place.  And with regular patronage, you become a friend to the place and have your reason for choosing it (so justly) from the start: the people are friendly.  There, I reread the letter. 



By the 1930's the anthracite fields were doomed; by the 50's they were in their last throes of production.  My grandfather was losing his work and his last child.  I think a part of him had to be left behind.  My grandmother, I've been told, muttered something about a ring finger for a ring--that it was a bad sign.  Was it a way to say good-bye, or a way to stay behind?  Things did not go well for the newlyweds in either case.  Later,  I dreamt about a man who was writing a book which consisted primarily of subscript.  And suddenly everyone realized that there, in the subscript, was the sunny side.  It was there all along.  I can't tell.  I only wish it was a woman writer typing in my unconscious. . . .  So, I drank a whiskey (along with my espresso), in memory of my grandfather who I knew would appreciate the thought, and walked home.  A local festival with music, food, and dancing seemed to have spontaneously generated in the small park near my apartment, a block or two from the Tiber.  The band was f rom South America and played salsa.  

In this old Roman neighborhood, I was surprised.  It was a clear night and a half moon shone through the cypress trees.  I practiced the night and the moon into my memory.  But all that has truly stayed with me is the aroma of coffee and softness of the yellowed letter's pages.  



The "Buried Valley of the Wyoming" lies deep in the Pocono Mountains, torn from the earth when a glacier receded with the last Ice Age.  In this place, they found riches, one of the earth's greatest deposits of hard coal.  The first settlers called the Valley "St. Anthony's Wilderness."  

St. Anthony is the one who followed instructions to the letter.  The gospel said, "Do not be anxious about tomorrow."  So, as insurance against worry, he sold all his worldly goods and headed for the city limits.  Just one problem.  What to do with a younger sister?  In those days, taking a girl into the wilderness was bad form; she was sent instead to a "house of virgins."  God rewarded this saint with a promise:  His name would be famous throughout the earth.  In the eleventh century, a plague was called "St. Anthony's Fire."  Like smallpox, it brought inflammation, skin eruptions, fever, death.  

The Indians hadn't heard of St. Anthony, though they experienced the fire.  Smallpox came with the blankets that the British and French offered in exchange for furs.  The Indians called the Valley, "Towamensing," the wild place.  They did not go there often.  The Indians were called Delawares or Lenni Lenape.  The Lenni Lenape now live on reservations in Oklahoma or in Moraviantown, Canada.  Long after they paddled away, the shape of the northern coal field is still compared to a canoe.  



"We never go anywhere anymore, except to the shrines," Sophie repeats.  She doesn't expect her sister, Mari, to argue.  The coal has burned itself out in the stove.  Mari is cold and comfortable with silence.  The silence after the whistle blasts from the works, signaling the beginning of the wait, the wait for news, who died, who didn't.  This should be respected.  It is a call to the future, pointing in only one direction.  Like fruit waiting to ripen.  On the windowsill.  The acrid smell of sulfur, the ripe smell of pitch, come and sit themselves in lumps there.  Where it's certain they belong.  Where the railway cars out back stir and nudge one another on the track beds.  Where the rails themselves settle on fallen coals.  Where the hushed sound of running rats lingers between the train wheels; rats always the first to escape a cave-in.  From the caverns below.  Where the dull thudding of the breaker echoes.  Below all the houses in the Valley, something shudders, trembles.